Scenario-based specification and evaluation of architectures for health monitoring of aerospace structures

HUMS (Health and Usage Monitoring Systems) have been an area of increased research in the recent times due to two main reasons: (a) increase in the occurrences of accidents in the aerospace, and (b) stricter FAA regulations on aircraft maintenance There are several problems associated with the maintenance of aircraft that the HUMS systems can solve through the use of several monitoring technologies. Currently, a variety of maintenance programs are institutionalized by the aircraft carriers that mostly involve visual inspections and hence are error-prone Automatic, continuous health monitoring systems could simplify the maintenance tasks as well as improve the efficiency of the operation, thereby enhancing the safety of air travel and also lowering the total lifecycle costs of aircraft. This paper documents our methodology of employing scenarios in the specification and evaluation of architecture for HUMS. It investigates related works that use scenarios in software development and describes how we use scenarios in our work. Finally, a demonstration of our methods in the development of HUMS is presented.